Gravewriter (27 page)

He could not live this way forever, stalking Maddox in his sleep, waking in horror, shocked to have clean hands.

I hunt for blood at night.… I'm a vampire.

Billy had hoped that if he looked long enough into his own eyes in
the mirror, he would see the darkest part of himself and learn if he really could take revenge on Maddox. But he had given up trying to see his own soul. His reflection had told him nothing. He really was a vampire, of sorts. Or worse—what if he was Hamlet?

His thoughts clarified and he realized he didn't need to learn what he was capable of doing; he just needed to decide what to do.

Down the hall, his pop cried out, “Stand like a man!”

What the hell—

Softly, Billy called back, “Pop?”

He listened.

All silent.

Billy turned off the simmering milk and stepped to his father's bedroom. Ear to the door, he listened to the old man snore. It sounded like he was trying to start a chain saw. His father had been talking in his sleep.

Stand like a man?

What did he mean by that? What was dreaming of? His wheelchair? Or me?

Billy stopped at Bo's room and peered in.

The blankets were balled at the foot of the bed, the twin pillows balanced together in a pyramid.

The kid was gone.

Billy pushed open the door, “Bo?”

He clicked on the light. “Bo?” The box that held the boy's Batman costume was on the floor, open and empty.

By the light of a streetlamp outside the window, Billy saw that Bo had pushed his Batman mask up onto his head so that he could use the telescope. The boy's right eye was scrunched tightly shut, his left pressed to the eyepiece of Mr. Metts's telescope in the front room of
the funeral parlor beneath the apartment. Bo's toy pistol, a realistic cast-metal model of a .38 revolver, was stuck in his waistband. The heavy toy gun threatened to pull down his pajama bottoms. The telescope was level, aimed across the parade field, toward the sandstone armory.

“Bo.”

“Eeee!” the kid shrieked.

He recoiled from the telescope and his little butt hit the floor.

“It's just me, Bo.”

Bo nodded. “Mmm.” He climbed to his feet. In the excitement, the toy gun had slipped into his pants. He reached down there, fished around a little while, and brought it out.

“What are you doing here?” Billy asked. “Do you know what time it is? What would Mr. Metts say if he caught you down here?”

“Mr. Metts don't mind—he showed me how to use the telescope.”

Billy bit his own index finger. He had made the rookie reporter's mistake of asking too many questions, and Bo had taken the politician's escape, answering the one he wanted to.

“What are you looking at?”

Bo pulled the Batman mask back down over his face. “Nothing,” he said.

“Maybe I could take a look.”

Bo hesitated. “I'm on a mission.” The voice behind the mask was suspicious, unsure how much to share.

The plastic Batman face grimaced at Billy. He had seen that tough-guy stare before, from collectors who believed you
could
get blood from a stone, if you squeezed it hard enough and slapped it a few times. Billy squatted to the kid's level. “I won't ruin your mission,” he promised. “I could help.”

The boy's suspicion evaporated, replaced by hyperactive energy. “You could be Robin!” He pumped his little legs in excitement.

“I don't have a mask.”

“Sometimes they don't wear masks, like when they're at home.”

Billy saluted. “Okay, boss,” he said. “What's our mission?”

With the exhilaration of a sugar rush, Bo reported, “I'm spying on the spy!” He put his eye to the telescope, fiddled with the focus knob, and then stood aside.

Billy put his eye to the scope. The scene across the parade field meant nothing to him at first—a streetlamp illuminating a park bench, three cars parked illegally, two with orange parking tickets on the windshield. He started to ask what to look for.

Then Billy felt a chill. His windpipe tightened, as if from a noose.

In the parked car without a ticket sat a man in a trench coat. Billy recognized the brute with a limp who had tailed him through Federal Hill.

The man was watching Billy's house.

Billy recognized the car, too, a little black Subaru—probably the car that had followed him onto the highway.

“How long has this guy been there?” Billy whispered.

“I been watching him a few days,” Bo said. “Since I saw him peeking in Mr. Metts's windows. He's a spy!”

“Is he there every morning?”

“Sometimes he's on the other side of the park.”

Billy watched the man sip from a can. “What does he do? Does he just sit there?”

“He's a spy,” Bo repeated. “He spies on us.”

Billy stood back from the telescope. What to do? Call the cops? Then the man would know they were onto him. Would that be bad?

“Do you think he wants your money?” Bo asked.

“What?” Billy looked into the blue beads shining through Batman's eyeholes. “Why would he want my money?”

Bo kicked at the carpet. “Grandpa says bad men take the money you lose in bets and that's why I don't have a bicycle.”

“He said that?” Billy burned with a brief burst of anger.

“I have thirty-seven dollars,” the boy confessed. He glanced away, deeper into the funeral home. “I was saving it for somebody else, but you can have it, Billy.”

“Bo—” he began, and then fell hushed. Such a gesture of self-sacrifice …

In a sudden whoosh of emotion, Billy fell in love with the four-foot stranger who had lived in his house for a year. He hugged the boy—truly held him for the first time since Angie had thrown Billy out.

From his love came rage. Billy seethed over the man sitting in the car across the park, who could be a threat to this little person. He stood, wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “I'm going on a mission,” he said. “Gimme your toy gun.”

Bo handed it up.

Early in the morning, with the light still dim, the toy could pass as real.

“You're my backup,” Billy said.

The kid straightened to attention, stiffened by responsibility.

“Watch through the telescope,” Billy said. “If something happens, wake your grandpa.”

The morning was cool. Dew beaded on wrought-iron fences. The rising sun glimmered off slick slate roofs on the neighborhood's old Victorians. Billy had slipped out the back door and walked a wide circle around the neighborhood, approaching the black Subaru from behind.

He was going to find out who this guy was. His hand clenched the fake gun. This was dangerous, of course. What if the guy had a real weapon?

It's all in the attitude.

Attitude would make the toy gun real.

Billy looked to the funeral home across the parade field. He imagined Bo in the front window. The kid would be looking at Billy. He nodded and gave a thumbs-up.

The man in the car was reading the paper and drinking Dr Pepper. His window was down.

Billy strode to the car and jammed the toy gun in the man's face.

The man jerked back, eyes wide. He blinked rapidly a moment, then looked up at Billy.

He was older than Billy had expected, maybe sixty. White tuffs sprouted like cotton balls on his knuckles. His hair had been buzzed to a crew cut. His eyes were set deep beneath a high brow. The car was spotless; it might have looked like a rental if not for the plastic Saint Christopher standing ironically on the dash.

“Who the fuck are you?” Billy demanded.

The man said nothing. He calmly folded his paper and laid it on the seat beside him.

“Why have you been following me?”

No answer. Was this guy deaf?

“Tell me who you are or I'll blast your brains all over that nice upholstery.”

The man looked away for a moment, tapped his thumb twice on the steering wheel, glanced back to Billy with a frown, and then started his car.

“I'll kill you,” Billy bluffed. “I mean it.”

Without a word or another glance, he drove away. The license plate was smeared with mud, unreadable.

Billy watched the car disappear. Then he waved to the funeral home so that Bo would know he was okay.

What balls that guy had—to drive away with a gun in his face.

Billy looked at the toy in his hand. Seemed real enough. He looked down the barrel and then slapped his own forehead. “Jesus Christ!” he shrieked.

Bo had corked the gun with a breakfast carrot.

O
n the first page of his legal pad, Martin wrote the questions for his final witness. On the second page, he jotted notes for the appeal. They were going to lose; Peter was going to be convicted—Martin was sure of it. Dillingham had obliterated Peter at the end of his cross-examination. Maybe Martin hadn't prepared Peter correctly. Maybe it had been a mistake to come forward with the bloody jumpsuit.

Can telling the truth be a mistake?
The question, he imagined, would bother his sleep for a long time.

He tossed down his pen and stared at the stucco ceiling in his office. He counted six black ants up there, walking crazy curlicues. Looking around, he noticed three ants on the wall, two on his desk. One had the gall to march across his pad.

In the abstract, Martin was neutral toward ants: He had no love for them, but he didn't mind if they colonized the cracks in the sidewalk. His office, though, was different. He hated them here. Still, he could not kill them. He had a deep-reaching fear—probably irrational, but you never know—that his wife would look into his eyes while they made love and screech, “You have murdered within the
animal kingdom!” Such was a sex life with an über-vegan. So he lived with the ants.

Martin rubbed his eyes …
Wait a second.

He popped open his eyeglass case. The spider inside reached up two legs and scratched the air. Martin shooed the spider onto a bookcase. “You can stay,” he said, “so long as you're catching bugs.”

The telephone clanged on Martin's desk.

He waited two rings for Carol to answer it, then remembered he was alone and that Carol was probably on the other end of the line.

“Hello?”

“The judge gave the fifteen-minute warning,” Carol said.

“I'll walk right over.”

She caught something in his voice. “Marty, you've done your best,” she said. “You gave him a fighting chance. And it's not over yet.”

“It's over,” he replied. “Nobody can find Franklin Flagg, and I'm down to my last witness, whom I'd never dare put on the stand unless the situation was absolutely desperate. Pastor Guy is running for office. He's a loose cannon. Who knows what he's gonna say?”

“What about a hung jury?”

“You bring the rope, I'll hang ‘em,” he offered. “It's the only way Peter will avoid going down for murder.”

“What about the person who sent you the jumpsuit? What if they came forward?”

“Not much chance of that,” Martin said, growing more glum. “If they had nothing to hide, they would have just walked the evidence over here.”

“Well, at least you can go down like a champ,” she said, trying to sound encouraging.

“I've just convinced you that it's hopeless,” Martin said. “You're the first person I've persuaded of
anything
since I took this case.”

Billy's hands still quivered from his encounter that morning with the man in the trench coat.

I threatened to kill him with a carrot.

The only person in the courtroom who looked more nervous was Peter Shadd, who fidgeted, scratched his skin, rubbed his own headlooking like performance art entitled
Nervous Tic.

Nobody else on the jury seemed to notice Shadd. They had mentally checked out and were only occupying space in the jury box until it was time to vote.

“Mr. Smothers?” the judge said. “You have another witness?”

“Abraham Guy, Your Honor.”

The judge nodded to a sheriff, who vanished into the hall to call out, “Abraham Guy!”

After a few moments, the sheriff held the door for a red-faced man on one of those self-balancing scooters. He carried a Bible in one hand and steered the machine with the other. He wore a gray suit, maroon vest, and a bow tie.

A pastor who could be the next governor, entering court on a two-wheel scooter?

That put life back into the jury. He had their attention.

Word of Pastor Guy's testimony had drawn half a dozen political reporters to court. Billy couldn't blame them. There was a time he would have been fascinated by the spectacle of the pastor sparring with Ethan Dillingham in an election preview.

At the witness stand, the pastor stepped off the machine and faced the court clerk.

The empty scooter balanced itself on two wheels, seeming to defy gravity with artificial intelligence. Billy figured everyone in the courtroom, including the judge, was thinking the same thing:
I've got to try one of those.

“Raise your right hand,” the clerk instructed.

The pastor raised his hand. “If you don't mind,” he said, “I've brought my own Bible.”

The clerk smiled. “We don't use a Bible. You can just swear by your oath.”

Pastor Guy turned up his nose. “Nonsense,” he said. “If I swear an oath, I use a Bible.” He slapped the leather-bound book on the rail with a crackling echo and rested his left hand on it.

Billy stared at the Bible. It was identical to the bloody book he had found in the old boathouse. Pastor Guy's prison ministry must have given all the inmates the same edition.

The clerk put him under oath. The pastor sat and cradled the Bible as he would a baby.

“Good day, Mr. Guy,” Martin Smothers began.

The pastor smiled and nodded, projecting the presence of a man too busy to be there but content to do his duty.